한국 EFL 대학생의 사회 불안과 외국어 불안과의 관계에 대한 고찰

A Study on the Relationship between Social Anxiety and Foreign Language Anxiety of Korean EFL College Students

(Purpose) One of the goals of learning English as a foreign language (EFL) is to communicate properly but EFL anxiety has been found to be one of obstacles to EFL learning. Since listening and speaking language are interactive processes, listening anxiety is possibly related to speaking anxiety, resulting in poor performance when learning English. Moreover, as language is used as a communicative tool, anxiety in social interaction might have an effect on EFL anxiety. The purpose of this study, thus, was to examine whether and how social anxiety and interpersonal orientation were associated with English listening and speaking anxiety. (Design/methodology/approach) 94 freshmen who enrolled in college English classes participated in the survey of this study. We used a Foreign Language Listening Anxiety Scale to measure English listening anxiety and Public Speaking Class Anxiety Scale to measure English speaking anxiety. In addition, Social Avoidance Distress Scale was used to measure social anxiety and Fundamental Interpersonal Relation Orientation-Behavior short version was used to measure interpersonal orientation of EFL learners. (Findings) This study has shown that social anxiety was strongly associated with English speaking anxiety and the relationship between social anxiety and English speaking anxiety was mediated by English listening anxiety. Moreover, interpersonal orientation moderated the relationship between social anxiety and English speaking anxiety. It was shown that the learners with a high interpersonal orientation showed high English speaking anxiety even though their social anxiety was low. (Research implications or Originality) The findings of this study imply that it is important to reduce social anxiety when learning English because social anxiety is strongly related to English listening and speaking anxiety. Furthermore, since individual characteristics such as interpersonal orientation also has an effect on anxiety when learning English, characteristics of learners should be considered. Since Virtual Reality(VR) systems could be useful in considering learner’s attributes as well as reduce anxiety, we suggest that it is necessary to develop a VR environment for learning a foreign language(FL).